The art and humanty studies need to be stimulated too

Stimulating Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) subjects that launched by the ministry of education is timely. The lack of interest in those subjects is critical as only 20% of total students choose the pure science fields, far from 60% government’s target. This current progress might affect the country’s aspiration to not over-reliant on foreign highly skilled labor, predominantly when the nation is pursuing the high-income by 2020.

The serious encouragement to cultivate student’s interest in STEM subjects seems to be the long run solution. The old memorizing approach of text books should be transformed to the critical thinking style among young learners. In other words, the learning process should be looked more interesting, creative and futuristic in order to make it more attractive.

While the pure science stream has been emphasized by the government for a better future of country’s economy, the arts, humanities and social science studies should not be ignored. Even majority of students enroll these courses, some of them are not too keen with, but have no choice as pure science stream requires high academic qualification especially in science and math subjects. As a result, the quality of arts and humanity studies also has been affected.

If the pure science needs critical thinking among students, there is no difference for art and humanity studies since they deal with humans. In fact, developing human character as individual, society or nation are not enough by focusing on physical element, but culture, civilization, ethics, human right and spirituals also need to be grown up.  Thus, the country necessarily needs the best historians, sociologists, psychologists, counselors, religious person as well as scientists, engineers, and doctors.

Having said that there were eleven challenges mentioned by Dr Mahathir twenty four years ago that must be faced by Malaysian to achieve a developed nation, the first nine is to create the attitude of society. Establishing a strong unity among people, creating a psychologically liberated nation, developing a mature democratic society, establishing a fully moral and ethical citizen are necessary apart from economy’s development. 

A few years ago, the fourth prime minister, Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has expressed his concern as he described even Malaysia own the first class facilities but Malaysians’ mentality is the third class level. Thus, fostering a developed nation must be balanced between developing physically necessary coupled with establishing the best character of society. One of the solutions is to improve the quality of the art and humanity studies as well as the pure science studies.